IDEAS TO LIVE BY from www.theschooloflife.com

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October 27, 2011

Dr Thomas Dixon, writer of the excellent History of Emotions blog, recently interviewed Professor of History at Weber State University, and a leading historian of emotions in the United States, Susan J. Matt. Her first book, Keeping Up With the Joneses, was a study of envy in modern consumer society, and her latest work tackles another emotion: homesickness, in a book titled Homesickness: An American History(Oxford University Press, 2011) which explores how homesickness and nostalgia were transformed from deadly maladies to allegedly un-American emotions.

Thomas Dixon [TD]: Hello, Susan, and thanks for talking to us. Perhaps I could start by asking you what got you interested in homesickness?

Susan Matt [SM]: The original impetus was that my own emotional experience of mobility didn’t match up with the mythology of American restlessness. Commentators like Tocqueville and Frederick Jackson Turner as well more modern observers all claimed Americans were naturally restless, that somehow it was in our cultural DNA to leave home. I didn’t find it so effortless or easy to move, and began to wonder if I was alone. Perhaps there was a flip side to American mobility–a hidden history of homesickness. Homesickness also interested me because it seemed in many ways to be the opposite of an emotion I had just been studying–envy. Envy sparks aspirations, pushes people forward, often causes mobility. Homesickness pulls backwards. Both emotions play a role in modern individualism in the U.S.. Americans are encouraged to repress homesickness so they can leave home, be independent, seek more of the world’s goods, act on their envy.

TD: It’s interesting that it was your own emotions that fuelled your desire to revisit their history. I suspect many historians of emotion are in that position. So, what surprised you most about what you discovered when you started digging around in the history of homesickness?

SM: First, how prevalent the emotion was. I thought it would be difficult to unearth, but instead, evidence of homesickness was abundant and easy to find in just about every archive I worked in. Secondly, and perhaps more provocatively, I was surprised at how many Americans died of homesickness, or nostalgia as it was called. I knew there had been European epidemics of nostalgia in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, but didn’t know of American ones. But indeed, the disease of nostalgia was widely known in the United States–during the Civil War, there were 74 deaths from it on the Union side, and more than 5,200 cases of it in the Surgeon General’s records.

SD: It became such a problem that army bands were sometimes prohibited from playing “Home, Sweet Home,” which at that time, was the most popular song in the country. In peacetime, civilians suffered from nostalgia as well. The prevalence and intensity of nostalgia and homesickness throughout U.S. history – from the colonial era to the present - ultimately led me to question whether we were and are the individualists that we are so widely reputed to be. I think we’re not.

TD: I’ve been struck too by the great power of the passions in earlier periods – to cause illness, madness or even death. Medical sources of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries abound with fatal bouts of emotion. Is it possible to pinpoint a date after which this changed – when homesickness and nostalgia became mere feelings rather than powerful and potentially fatal mental conditions?

SM: It gradually disappeared as a dangerous disease in the first half of the 20th century. The U.S. Army provides a useful gauge in its records. One soldier in the American Expeditionary Force reportedly died of nostalgia during World War I. Increasingly during the War, however, many of the symptoms associated with nostalgia came to be defined as signs of the newly established syndrome of shell shock. While the diagnosis of nostalgia stayed on the books up through World War II, and while there were many reported cases of it among soldiers in that war, there were no deaths. In short, from the early twentieth century on, the number of cases of deadly nostalgia declined, although less lethal cases of homesickness continued (and continue) to abound. It seems worth noting that as nostalgia’s cultural meaning underwent this transformation, the tolerance for the acutely homesick declined, since their condition was now seen as less dire.

TD: Historically you clearly have a really fascinating story to tell about nostalgia and homesickness as modern emotions experienced, as all emotions always are, within a particular geographical and cultural situation, in this case in modern America. I wonder what you think about the contemporary importance of this research, and also of research into the history of emotions more broadly?

SM: The history of homesickness explains a great deal about modern American culture and our national identity. Adults in modern America have learned to repress overt expressions of homesickness, for it has come to connote immaturity, a lack of ambition, and failure. It is out of step with the ethos of modern capitalism, which prizes mobility and individualism. However, while they may not discuss their homesickness publicly, in daily habits and behaviors, American make their feelings about displacement manifest. From ethnic groceries that sell the tastes of faraway homes, to sports teams which symbolize loyalty to a hometown, to our addiction to Facebook, cell phones, and emails, Americans routinely show their preoccupation with staying connected to distant places and people. While we may think of ourselves as an individualistic society, our everyday lives suggest otherwise. And our history – full of people suffering and sometimes dying of homesickness - makes clear that mobility has in fact never been an innate trait of Americans. Instead, they had to learn to leave home, and they have still not completely mastered the art of rugged, restless individualism.

The history of the emotions offers historians and the public a new set of tools to assess the past. Rather than merely judging history on the basis of external behaviors, we can bring in people’s motivations and intentions. These often provide a completely different understanding of social life and revises many of our longstanding narratives about national identity.

Dr Thomas Dixon is Director of the Queen Mary Centre for the History of Emotions.

Image: American sheet music of ‘Home, Sweet Home’ arranged for piano and violin, c. 1870s. Source American History Online

October 13, 2011

In recent years our concern for smell has become heightened – helped by smoking bans, and air pollution. It’s perhaps not surprising that we’ve also seen an increasing obsession with managing our own personal impressions, through the use of deodorants, air fresheners, perfumes, car fragrances, clothes sprays, body creams and even flavoured breath mints.

Once considered to be the least important sense, 2004 Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientists, Richard Axel and Linda B. Buck, conclusively proved the power of smell. Since then, products, conversations and aroma possibilities have abounded. But, despite our ability to recall over 10,000 smells, we still have an incredibly stunted vernacular to describe smells without naming the object or cause of the aroma. There is also no agreement, between individual or master perfumers, about what smells good and what doesn’t. Our olfactory values are social, cultural, gender specific, age related and genetically determined.

From the 1980s onwards, we’ve known that crucial factors in purchase decision-making were based upon the emotional and sentimental state. This makes smell a hugely powerful tool for retailers, as this is exactly where smell and memory come into their own. Olfaction is passive, and the experience of odour types can be pervasive and subtle, working at a very different level of cognition. It’s not surprising that brands are increasingly waking up to their powers.

Scratch ‘n’ sniff may seem like something from a time gone by, but the use of scent is the biggest developing trend in sensory marketing and branding today. Fragrance logos which are unique to a product or company are increasingly being used. Diffused when the brand and/or product is present, the limbic part of the brain responds to sensory clues and hard-wires the response in the body-memory.

Odor-styling looks set to diversify and possibly to replace a large percentage of current advertising techniques which are not engaged on a sensory level. Since the advent of digital technologies and cyber worlds, odour biometrics and artificial fragrances are being developed and explored to their full potential.

So, take a deep breath, because you are about to get a scents of things to come. The world of ‘aromanomics’ is about to infiltrate our world; and what is more, we may never know it!

Dr Morgaine Gaye is a Food Futurologist - academic, consultant and presenter, who looks at food and eating from a social, cultural, economic, trend, branding and geo-political perspective. She will be part of the team leading 'A Day of Good Scents' on November 26. Click here for more details.

October 04, 2011

People often say, after a class at the School of Life, that they weren’t expecting to enjoy talking so much, and especially not to complete strangers. Perhaps there is a freedom there, they muse; no past, no baggage, just the meeting of curious minds. I think so too. It is an unusual environment: a place of conversation about the things that matter between people who have probably never met before. Jurgen Habermas said that in the London coffee houses of the 18th Century we find the origins of a properly public space that had no affiliation to the state - a place where conversation flowed and where ideas thrived. John Stuart Mill saw conversation as one of the primary sources of progress in human civilization; to put ourselves outside of our assumptions about who we are and what we believe is exhilarating and, at best, down-right life affirming.

So the conversations that really matter, said Theodore Zeldin, are the ones that change us. You want to change the world? You want the future to be brighter than the past? Start talking, to anyone and everyone, about what matters. Imagine those future professors, sifting digital archives of our times, forced to conclude that we were a wise and subtle people who pursued each other’s company with vigor and abandon, brave souls who knew, if only by dimly lit intuition, that simply to talk to others across boundaries and barriers of difference would be a powerful tool for shaping a better world. Is that too optimistic? Plug in, log on, dial up, connect, interrupt, catch an eye or just go ahead and introduce yourself. How ever you like to do it, just think this to yourself: with whom shall I converse, freely, on this most extraordinary of days?

Hugo Whately is a faculty member of The School of Life and regular teacher of our classes. Join him for the next session of 'How to Be Alone' this Thursday 6 October.

September 29, 2011

Happiness is just a neurochemical spurt. Different happy chemicals produce different ways to experience happiness.

Endorphin happiness is triggered by physical pain. The body's natural morphine masks pain, which allowed our ancestors to run from predators when injured. Humans experience endorphin as euphoria, but it obviously did not evolve to trigger a constant feeling of joy. You would touch hot stoves and run on a broken leg if your brain were always releasing endorphins. Nature saves them for moments when they help you do what's necessary to survive.

Dopamine happiness is triggered when you get a new reward. When you see a finish line, your brain releases dopamine. It's nature's reserve tank of energy. Dopamine keeps you going until you catch the prey you've been stalking, even when the chase is long and frustrating. If you surged with dopamine all the time, your energy would be depleted when you really needed it. We evolved to save dopamine for those moments when an important goal is within reach.

Oxytocin happiness is triggered when we trust those around us. It promotes bonding between mother and child, and between sex partners. It's stimulated when you're with a group of like-minded people, or when you get a massage. But we did not evolve to feel oxytocin happiness all the time because there's no survival value in trusting people who are not trustworthy.

Serotonin happiness is triggered when you feel important. Animals release serotonin when they dominate a resource. Their serotonin falls when they cede a resource to avoid conflict. Being one-up feels good, but conflict can cause painful injuries. The brain is constantly analyzing information to balance the risk of pain against the satisfaction of winning.

Each of the happy chemicals evolved to do a job. They work by making you feel good, which motivates you to go after whatever triggered them. You have inherited a brain that motivates you to go toward anything that promotes the survival of your DNA.

Sometimes you stumble on happiness. When an ape accidentally stumbles on a luscious fruit tree, its brain surges with dopamine. That creates memory, which helps the ape find the tree in the future. New rewards trigger dopamine whether the rewards came by accident or with sustained effort.

The happy chemicals feel so good that we use our big cortex to figure out how to get more. Apes negotiate groomings with each other, and it stimulates their oxytocin. Apes dominate their troop-mates when they think they can get away with it, which stimulates their serotonin. Apes invest time teasing termites out of a mound, and it stimulates their dopamine. Apes are not known to hurt themselves in order to get an endorphin high. People do all kinds of things once they find that it stimulates their endorphins, or their dopamine, or their oxytocin, or their serotonin.

Sometimes it works.

But the brain only releases happy chemicals in limited bursts for specific aims. It did not evolve to release them all the time. If happy chemicals flowed all the time, they could not do their jobs.

Nothing is wrong. Your happy chemicals evolved to ebb and flow. But if you attend to this feeling that something is wrong, it can preoccupy you. Your cortex will scan the environment for evidence that something is, in fact, wrong. And it will find evidence to confirm that feeling.

If you expect all the happy chemicals all the time, you're going to be disappointed. And if you focus on that disappointment, you wire your brain to see the world through that lens.

Try as you might, you can't control your environment in a way that ensures a steady flow of happy chemicals.

You could instead accept the fact that happy chemicals evolved to promote survival behaviors, and just appreciate them as they come and go.

September 27, 2011

I sometimes fantasize about a rather square afterlife: a dataporn epilogue in which we're given a wealth of terminal data about our lives. It’s a kind of existential debriefing.

Sometimes I visualise this afterlife as an austere 1970s science lab, with ranges of analogue counting wheels, each halted eternally at their final numbers. Other times I imagine it as a live TV event: an enthusiastic presenter delivers a piece-to-camera from the top of Telecom Tower, finger pressed to her earpiece and declaring that, “Yes, the results are in!”

In this great auditing house in the sky, every metric is recorded: the number of times we went to the bathroom, the number of hours we slept, the number of good or bad decisions made, the number of moral victories or ethical betrayals.

Some of the metrics won’t really matter. Number of blinks or heartbeats are beyond my control and do not mean much either way. But some of the metrics in this Valhalla databank will be causes of pride or shame.

A statistic for which I—the editor of New Escapologist, a magazine about the exercise of free will (whether imagined or actual)—would take pride in being high would be number of days of freedom. Every day spent living freely is a victory. If the celestial auditors are indeed watching, I hope they’re able to record that the total number of these victories outweighs the number of days spent serving forces other than my moral will.

A statistic I would like to keep low is "Number of intentions unrealised". It’s very acceptable to abandon something deliberately, or to reform a plan partway through. But there's nothing more shameful than when a plan falls to the wayside, is forgotten about, or is simply never taken seriously as a possibility.

Alas, there is probably no afterlife and we’ll never be given such a cache of perfect data (and if we are, it’ll be largely pointless once our lives are over). If we want to collect data about our living patterns, we must simply resolve to document more. A longhand journal will provide qualitative data. A tally against certain metrics will provide the quantitative. At the end of a given period, we can analyse the data we've gathered; draw conclusions, make predictions, and make changes to our habits.

To measure my “unrealised intentions” and to keep this statistic small, I have started maintaining a “Maybe Someday” list. Any ideas I have, whether big or small, go onto this list. I will later incorporate them into my plans or decisively obliterate them from my ambitions once and for all.

I’m also trying to reconnect with things I enjoyed in childhood: dinosaurs, chemistry, puppets, astronomy, fossils, wildlife. Maybe this way I can identify some early ambitions never acted upon, and have them scored from my shameful tally of forgotten plans.

There is something vaguely perverse about analyzing such water under the bridge. It’s like making notches on a bedpost, or examining the fresh contents of a handkerchief. But so what? A toilet that analyses one's poop for nutritional excesses and deficiencies would be a wonderful thing. There's no such thing as "TMI" when making changes to our lives is concerned.

So what data would you record? What would you like to change?

**

Robert Wringham is a humourist, travelling performer, and the editor of New Escapologist: a magazine that celebrates 'flight' over 'fight'. The sixth issue of this publication is now available, as well as a growing wealth of related online content at www.newescapologist.co.uk

September 23, 2011

"Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand.

It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust.

You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time.

They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode.

So, forget Jesus.

The stars died so that you could be here today."

Lawrence Krauss, Professor of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona University, will lead our next sermon on Sunday 16 October, to show how each of us is connected to the cosmos in ways we’d never imagine. From the stardust we’re made of, to the atoms we breathe, to the curving of space time that governs the way we make our way through traffic jams, to time travel itself. Ordinary life just isn’t that ordinary.

September 16, 2011

"It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal materials of the mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world." - Ben Okri

As human beings, we’ve always told stories: stories about who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going. Now imagine that one of those stories is taking over the others, becoming something we take for granted as our very reality - a governing pattern that the culture obeys, a nearly-invisible framework that structures our lives and narrows our diversity, creating a monoculture.

A monoculture doesn't mean that we all believe exactly the same thing or act in exactly the same way, but that we share key beliefs and assumptions about how the world works and what our lives ought to look like. Because a monoculture is mostly left unarticulated until it has been displaced years later, we learn its boundaries by trial and error. We somehow come to know how the master story goes, though no one tells us exactly what the story is or what its rules are. We develop a strong sense of what’s expected of us at work, in our families and communities — even if we sometimes choose not to meet those expectations. We usually don’t ask ourselves where those expectations came from in the first place. They just exist — or they do until we find ourselves wishing things were different somehow, though we can’t say exactly what we would change, or how.

Monocultures rise and fall with the times. In sixteenth-century Europe, the monoculture centred on religion and superstition (think of Galileo being accused of heresy by the Catholic Church for claiming that the sun and not the earth was at the center of the solar system). Roughly a hundred years later, the master story was about the discoverability of the world through science, machines and mathematics.

Now, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the monoculture is economic. Because of the rise of the economic story, six areas of your world are changing - or have already changed - in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. How you think about your work, your relationships with others and with the environment, your community, your physical and spiritual health, your education, and your creativity are being shaped by economic values and assumptions. And because how you think shapes how you act, the monoculture isn't just changing your mind - it's changing your life.

September 15, 2011

What is love supposed to be like? How will we know when we meet our ‘perfect’ partner?

Hollywood, in the form of romcoms, has given us very strange ideas about what is appropriate when it comes to meeting and mating with potential partners. The rules which they whimsically lay out for us, through the vehicles of overconfident men and spineless, dithering women, would end up in disaster if applied in real life. For the record, for most non-sociopathic men, if you say you’re not interested, he is going to believe you; don’t be surprised if he actually leaves you alone, rather than showing up outside your bedroom window with a boom box!

When we are looking for happy, compatible, long-term matches, we don’t tend to meet them the way they do in romcoms, whether it is someone whom we have made bets with our friends about, have pretended to have kids in order to meet, or have been found by our 8 yr. old son from a call in radio show.

In this blog, I will discuss two, of the nine important steps, from my course, ‘Finding a Perfect Partner.’ Two important factors to consider when searching for well-suited matches are commonality and proximity.

Commonality is critical in our quest to find a partner. While the well-known saying, ‘opposites attract’ is an old favourite, is it actually true? Probably, not. Instead, it should be ‘attraction increases as similarity between partners increases’. People tend to be attracted to people who are similar to themselves.[1] It is even advantageous to the relationship that our partner also enjoys seven-course tasting menus at poncy French restaurants, or would rather sing karaoke than go to a jazz club. By them sharing similar outlooks and interests, it helps to legitimise our preferences. It also increases the ‘we are on the same wave-length’ appeal or, if you are a die-hard romantic, the ‘soul-mate’ ideology.

Proximity is also important when finding a good match, because when we are near these ‘like-minded’ people, the number of interactions we could have with them increases. Another benefit from frequent sightings of the cutie in red, is that we will like him or her more. Research has shown that we prefer people whom we see more often, even if they are strangers. This is called the ‘mere exposure effect’[2]

So, while commonality and proximity are important factors, the ideal is when they overlap. We often find people whom we have things in common with are already in our immediate proximity. They are sitting at the table next to us at our favorite restaurant, they are doing a downward facing dog in the row behind us at our local yoga studio, and they are in the same queue while buying vegetables at the neighborhood Saturday market. Open your eyes, the people whom you are well-matched with, are doing the same things that you’re doing, and most likely, in your proximity. Your own neighborhood is the best place to begin your search. So this weekend, I recommend sitting outside your favourite cafe: when looking for love, you need to see and be seen!

Jean Smithis a cultural and social anthropologist – an international expert in human attraction, body language and how we flirt with one another. She will be leading 'How To Find the Perfect Partner' on 27 September and 7 November at The School of Life. For more details and to book, click here.

September 14, 2011

In a letter to today’s Guardian an impressive list of philosophers (and, intriguingly, several comedians) endorse the idea that we need more philosophy in our schools. Philosophy, they point out, is useful in developing reasoning and conceptual skills, and has spin-off effects on performance in other subjects. All true. But philosophy, as those signatories well know, is more than a sandpit in which to hone critical skills that have application elsewhere. It might be diplomatic to emphasize transferable techniques picked up from studying it, but we should also remember that philosophy has a distinctive subject matter and a rich literature.

Philosophy is the practice of thinking seriously about some of the deepest questions we can ask ourselves about the nature of reality and how we should live. We all have to reach conclusions about whether God exists, whether killing is always wrong, and about how we treat people who are less fortunate than us – either that, or accept other’s views unthinkingly. In that sense, almost any thinking person is a philosopher. We are fortunate in being able to draw upon more than 2,500 years of thought and debate in reaching our conclusions.

Reading and thinking about the great philosophers of the past can be a valuable experience in itself, and is rarely a visit to a museum of defunct ideas. René Descartes put it well: ‘To read good books is like having a conversation with the most eminent minds of past centuries, and moreover, a studied conversation in which these authors reveal to us only the best of their thoughts.’ (from his Discourse on Method). In this conversation disagreement is often more stimulating than agreement.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could openly endorse the value of engaging with the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Mill, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and co. rather than have to justify philosophy’s inclusion in the curriculum solely on the grounds that it sharpens the tools of thought. We need something to think about as well as something to think with.

September 13, 2011

I've worked in the field of intimate relationships for nearly three decades. But it was only in 2006, when I was asked to rewrite the classic erotic manual The Joy of Sex, that I fully realised how impossible sex can be.

Because ironically, there was very little joy in much of what I found when researching the book. The sexual revolution, which gave us so much liberty, also opened a Pandora's Box of Furies: more widespread pornography, infidelity, sexual infections; immense pressure to have perfect life-long intimacy; these added to the traditional but still present baggage of embarrassment and guilt.

The conundrum is that we're freer to have sex than ever before, but more than ever faced with double-binds and unhappy endings. We reach out for the luscious apple in the Garden of Eden - unlike Adam and Eve, we're now constantly conscious of the snake in the undergrowth.

Happily, rewriting The Joy of Sex eventually showed me that the above is often a red herring. As I expanded my academic research to interviews with real people who delighted in lovemaking, I also recontacted what you might call the naked truth. I came to understand that for all the current complexity, sex can still be what it always has been - an immensely powerful but nevertheless beautifully simple act. As such, it is absolutely possible.

Much of the work I've been doing of late has been aimed at helping people become aware of that. In particular, I've been presenting and teaching on the positive aspects of sex, on ways to strip away the negative associations. to reclaim what one might call an 'innocent' perspective.

To do this, of course, we need to understand how we've come to see sex as impossible. How society has through necessity fenced sexuality round, and how our current revolution has by removing those fences made everything more complicated. How even the most well-meaning of upbringing leaves a legacy of insecurity and shame, and how, by triggering a deep spectrum of human need, the sexual act makes everything more fraught.

All that once understood, it becomes much easier to separate out what we need to take on board around sex and what we don't; to develop our own sense of what is good and what we don't want to accommodate; to cut through the double-binds and make our own sexual decisions - in short, to make sex a real and wonderful possibility in our lives.